Our Brand is in Crisis: The Summer of the Requel

 

This summer, well at least July, is the summer of the requel, to use the term coined by the Scream films. Jurassic World: Rebirth, Superman, and Fantastic Four: First Steps are all in different ways attempts to do the work of both a sequel and a reboot. They are entries in a series that also attempts to reset it and restore it.There is a phoenix like quality to the modern intellectual property franchise; when an individual film crashes and burns, like Jurassic World: Dominion, Justice League, and F4ntastic Four (or whatever it was called), it only adds fuel to the fire, to a desire to get the film right next time. Of the three only Jurassic World is a straight up sequel, the two others, Superman and Fantastic Four are less sequels to the existing films of that series, but the stakes are even higher, they are an attempt to restore not just one entire series, but an entire cinematic universe, which is to say an entire brand.

What is striking is that all three make this task of the film of the brand, part of the movie itself. Jurassic World opens with fairly unlikely assertion that people are bored with dinosaurs. This seems unlikely to me, dinosaurs have been an object of fascination for kids for decades, and they have done so with only bones and pictures to work with. It is unclear if living dinosaurs would get boring. What is unlikely in the world of the film accurately reflects the status of the brand, however, which is burdened by more and more ridiculous sequels, culminating in the disastrous Jurassic World: Dominion. It is not dinosaurs that people have gotten sick of, but Jurassic World films. 

That Jurassic World: Rebirth was released during the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Jaws illustrates its failure. As I wrote earlier, both films are part of the sub-genre of animal horror, and this genre, like all genres, has its particular limitations. The animal is neither a monster nor a murderer. It has to be frightening but in a way that still situates it within animal behavior of hunting and killing. Jaws famously solved this problem, a problem that was doubled on the technical level with a mechanical shark that rarely worked, by using music, mood, and even characterization to convey the dread. I happened to watch one of the documentaries on Jaws, and in it Steven Spielberg said that the scene on board the Orca was one of the best he ever made. A lesson that seems to be lost on later films, which overlook the fact that it is what happens when the animal is off screen that builds the dread necessary to sustain the fear.

 

If one wanted to be a little more theoretical about this, drawing from Jameson's famous essay on mass culture, what a film needs is that element of utopia, that connection with actually existing anxieties and fantasies to sell the fantasy of the film. Jaws' beach community worrying about how they are going to make a living grounds the film, and a mayor willing to risk everyone to keep the money flowing makes it real. Or to put in in different language, that of Citton, all fiction is sustained by a metalepsis, by an ability to invoke something of our world in order to construct its own. Unable to find any kind of real world basis for their story, despite allusions to extinction and global warming, the Jurassic World films have doubled down on fantastic genetically modified monsters, thinking that an extra row of spikes or fangs can deliver the necessary fear to restore the brand. The scientists on the island producing new mutations are not too distinct from the special effect artists working on new hybrid dinosaurs. 

In both of the new superhero films, Superman and Fantastic Four, there is a similar moment when the crisis of the brand becomes internal to the narrative. Even though the new Superman skips anything like the standard origin story, assuming that we are all familiar with the destruction of Krypton and a baby arriving on Earth, it still alludes to it. We learn that Superman regularly listens to a recording of his original parents, Jor-El and Lara, talking about his role on Earth as a symbol of hope. The recording is damaged, and he is only able to hear part of it. It is only later, after Lex Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude and restores the corrupted file, that we hear the rest, that being a symbol of hope was only phase one of the plan one that sets up Superman to gather a harem to breed a race of supermen and women to take over the world. Lex Luthor is more than happy to exploit this new knowledge to bring down Superman with the help of the US government and an army of online monkeybots. 

One can grasp at least two metalepses in this particular narrative device. The first, and most obvious one, is the online army of troll bots that every film has to deal with before it is even released. In the case of Superman, of this version of Superman, this would be those who are loyal to the vision of Zack Snyder for reasons that remain a mystery to me. There is no small irony in this, the intellectual property film was supposed to dispense with both auteur and actor as organizing principle. People do not see a Zack Snyder or Christopher Nolan film, but a Batman film, people go to see Spider-Man, not Tobey Maquire or Tom Holland. Auteur and actors have returned as the repressed always does, and there are loyalties to both directors and actors that defy the brand, as in the aforementioned Snyderverse and, less inexplicably, in the inability to recast Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa. The Marvel movies are a mixed bag at best, but the one thing that they do very well is casting. It is hard to imagine anyone else playing the Black Panther just as it is hard to imagine anyone other than Robert Downey Jr playing Tony Stark or anyone other than Iman Vellani playing Ms. Marvel. This undermines the dominance of intellectual property. As Marvel enters Phase whatever, many of its audience does not want to move on due to a nostalgia for an earlier iteration. Of course in the larger world of superhero movies troll armies have been loyal to more than just a particular director; the superhero film has been thoroughly intertwined with a reactionary politics of nostalgia, in which the desire to relive childhood memories is also a desire to return to all white casts and characters and the good old days when women did not stray from romantic subplots. 

This brings us to our second metalepsis, one situated not in the form of media, online commentators, but content. To butcher a popular phrase, it is easier to imagine an all powerful alien becoming a world dominator than just being a nice guy and trying to help people. In the past decades Superman has been detourned into a dark and corrupt version of himself as in the case of Homelander from The Boys and Omni-Man from Invincible. James Gunn even produced and wrote a dark Superman story with Brightburn. The film takes this change of the prevailing imagination of power seriously, incorporating it into its narrative. Gunn's attempt to rebrand Superman in making the film is matched by Superman's own struggle to maintain his brand. The former takes the surprising, and now often memed formulation, that kindness is punk rock. (I am all for reminding people of this side of punk rock, especially as it contrasts with its sneering mass marketed image. I even made my own playlist). In a world where power and cruelty seem so readily aligned being powerful and kind is its own punk rebellion. As one meme put it, "In a world of Homelanders, be Superman." 

What is perhaps more interesting is what has happened to the other aspect of the Superman story, that it is, as James Gunn said, an immigrant story. The extended Fox News universe had a breakdown over this before the movie was released (as seen in the clip below, which has to be seen to be believed). The conservative reaction to this basic fact, Superman is an immigrant, an illegal one at that, has obscured how conservative its story of assimilation actually is both then and now. The premise of Superman is that the people of Kansas, ordinary rural Americans, are so good and decent that they could turn a powerful alien into a paragon of virtue and decency. In the film Superman rejects the message of his birth parents, to take over the world, and affirms the decency instilled on him by his adopted parents. It is the ultimate story of assimilation. This used to be the story that this country told about immigration, the story of the melting pot, the idea that America could make anyone into an American no matter how alien. It was of course a story which involved its own violence: a melting pot requires heat and there was a lot of work being done, say for example in Ford's factories, turning foreigners into Americans. We do not seem to believe in that story anymore, which is itself a kind of decline of hegemony and the power of the symbolic. 

The film combats nostalgia with nostalgia, returning us to an older audience of what immigrant used to mean. This is also tied up with its media nostalgia. You cannot tell a Superman story without telling a story of the Daily Planet and of intrepid reporter Lois Lane. In the film Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are able to defeat Lex Luthors online monkeybot army with a timely published expose of Lex Luthor's real intentions to set himself up as a king and dictator. As many have joked, the idea that a newspaper could change or transform the narrative stretches the suspension for disbelief more than a flying dog or pocket universe.

There are a great many parallels between Superman  and Fantastic Four: First Steps. They are both attempts by their respective studios to adapt a property that has alluded success. Superman has not had a good film since Superman II over forty years ago, the Fantastic Four has never had a film worth watching (I actually do not know. I have only watched parts of the previous ones). They are also similar films, both drop the origin story that has defined the superhero movie, beginning in media res, and they are also attempts by both studios to get their audiences past something called superhero fatigue and into the next phase of market domination.

Like Superman, Fantastic Four: First Steps makes brand management part of its plot. The action of the film begins when the Silver Surfer comes to Earth to Herald the arrival of Galactus. The four then travel to space to confront the giant. Galactus offers an exchange, he will spare the Earth in exchange for their unborn child. On their return to Earth, Reed Richards is honest with the media that this was too high of price, telling the world that he would not give up his son to save it. This turns the Fantastic Four from revered heroes to a hated elite overnight. The Fantastic Four have to figure out not only how to save the world from Galactus, but also how to manage their brand. They do so by appealing to a mother's love for her child. The film does this as well, making Sue Storm the most powerful of the Four, almost single handedly driving Galactus off of the planet. 

Sadly the new film continues the trend of neglecting the over the top excess of Reed's powers

Fantastic Four: First Steps is also a film permeated with nostalgia for a time and place that never existed. Its mid century modern aesthetic conjures images of the space race and the great society, but framed now in a more open, and less racist society. This nostalgia includes nostalgia for a different media universe as well. A few minutes into the film we see one of those notices for a television special, interrupting regular programs with a special presentation. The Fantastic Four live in a world where message and meaning are easier to control. This is borne out by the plot as well which involves a massive project to coordinate globally, and even a local project to evacuate half of New York. The Fantastic Four do not have monkeybots to contend with, just Mole Man and he can be invited over for a one on one.

Both Superman and Fantastic Four try to paper over their commodification with a bit of utopia, with an image of a kinder world, in the case of Superman, or the values of family commitments and connections, in the case of Fantastic Four. These are the bits of real life that we are supposed to relate to, and it is hard not to fault them on this, especially Superman which seems tor really want to offer a different image of what power and strength look like (I have not even mentioned its basic, but important stance against the bombing of children regardless of claims of national interests). However, the films' real concerns are elsewhere, on the difficulty of managing a brand in an age of brand exhaustion, to bring Jurassic World back into the conversation; online mediated trolling; and the attention economy.